I've been slowly but surely prepping a 'pulp jungle hex crawl' for my group's next campaign. I've been all over the place with regard to what resources to use and how to make best use of my time.
Last time, I posted a very minimalist hex map of a jungle island. Since then, I've been wrestling with how best to balance using content from other sources while still scratching a creative itch. My main inspirations are Hot Springs Island, Isle of Dread, and A Thousand Thousand Islands. Right now, the breadth of those sources of inspiration is competing with my natural tendency for minimalism and streamlined everything.
Honestly, reading and re-reading the above sources was super engaging, but working on how to synthesize them was kind of giving me a headache. I decided to pull myself away from analysis paralysis and just get started on some usable items for the table. Time for a checklist and some maps.
Based on the hex map I slapped together, I needed the following:
- 9 Jungle Tombs/Temples
- 5 Mines
- 4 Villages
- 4 Forts
I decided to start with the tombs and temples. I felt briefly compelled to make my own from scratch, but I quickly realized that I just don't have the time resources right now for it. Plus, there are loads of amazing tools online that could help.
I embraced minimalist prep and headed to Watabou's page on itch.io. Whatabou has a jillion amazing random generators for just about anything you could ever need. They are kind enough to allow folks to use the output of the generators in private and commercial creations as well. The look of the dungeons matches a jungle motif (in my opinion) since it has flooding built into the generator and includes random debris and crumbly bits.
I quickly zapped out nine small-medium sized dungeons with and without room numbers. I'll stock the dungeons after. Here's a peek at one of the dungeons. If you need a slick dungeon map on the quick for a session, you really gotta check out Watabou's one page dungeon generator page.
Next was the mines. I took a trip to Dyson's Dodecahedron and flipped through the free commercial use content in the Release the Kraken section. There was a bunch of gorgeous maps, as usual, but I found myself having to think too much again. I really wanted to get table-ready fast and stick to my minimalist philosophy.
So, I veered off to Donjon to see what I could find. I used the random dungeon generator to create some caverns. I like the look of the raw output, but I'm not sure what the usage rights are for the site. Not wanting to misuse anyone's stuff, I figured I should somehow jumble-ify the output to make it my own.
To do that I downloaded the caverns as .tsv files and uploaded them into Dungeon Scrawl. Dungeon scrawl spit out some slightly boxier versions of the content. I don't quite like the look as much as the raw output from Donjon, but I don't mind it too much either.
As for Dungeon Scrawl, it's a phenomenal resource and just one more great example of the generosity and creativity in the OSR community. The last item that I was able to check off the list were villages. Back to Watabou who has one more awesome generator that I would use for this. The village generator creates different sizes of villages on different landscapes with all kinds of options. I just wanted small, low density jungle villages. Here's an example of what I was able to retrieve:
So, not distinctly a jungle village I guess, but by removing roads from being displayed I think it looks a bit more rustic. I cranked the forest setting up full blast to get as much foliage on the map as possible to represent the dense jungle environment. I think it's fit to serve.
The last step is the trading/military forts. I've not yet found a generator or source of maps that really has wooden pallisade protected forts. The search continues!
I'll share more about my process of prepping this campaign as I go along!
